We are so immersed in the political campaign that we sometimes forget about the concrete world around us. Did you see that there is an atomic mushroom threat in Europe? Did you see that the very creative Argentine economists created not one, but 14 different exchange rates, including the “Coldplay dollar” and the “soy dollar”? And most importantly: did you notice that the Covid pandemic-19 is over?
To evoke the poet, this is how the pandemic ended: not with a thunderous pronouncement by Dr. Tedros, but with a groan. A whisper. A silence. Yeah, that’s it: a bureaucratic silence. From one day to the next, the infamous mortometers simply stopped being published, masks and gel alcohol went back to the sanitary hell they should never have left and the vaccination requirement became a joke. With the exception of a few neurotics that can be seen on the streets, the fear has disappeared.
I realized this a few days ago, when I went to to the market and, still at the entrance, remember when we had to smear ourselves with gel alcohol and measure the temperature before shopping. Which were limited to what the bureaucrats specialized in idiocracy said was essential. In a supermarket here in Curitiba, they even installed a “decontamination tunnel” for the carts. And to think that there were people who believed in siença behind it all!
Woe to anyone who said that everything was, is, and in a similar pandemic , will continue to be ridiculous. Soon he was branded “unscientific” and was forced to wander through the scorched earth of common sense. “What do you mean you don’t have empathy?!”, a pandeminion once asked me, taking advantage of the momentum to say that I was silly, ugly and papaya and that his Christianity was greater than mine, among other nonsense.
Amazed to see the end of the pandemic, I continued shopping. There’s already panettone on the gondolas, you know? Picking up a simple pack of batteries from the shelf, I almost cried. And I remembered a friend who, in the middle of the Curitiba winter, when temperatures are close to absolute zero (-273,15 °C ), was prevented by market security from buying a resistor for the electric shower. After shopping, I went to the cashier and saw with my own eyes that the earth will one day eat: they removed the protective acrylic that (hold back the laughter!) created a sanitary barrier between me and the attendant.
How is it that no one is celebrating this event that will go down in history as “The Fall of the Acrylic Barrier”? How is it that the newspapers didn’t print so big on the covers that THE PANDEMIA HAS ENDED? In my imagination, on the day the pandemic ended, the sparkling wine stocks. And we would light gigantic bonfires with the masks, around which we would dance until dawn. And we would pray for the souls of the dead. And we would embrace fearlessly. And the sound of someone coughing in the distance would start a burst of laughter. And that. Is that. And such.
Now that it’s over, here’s a pesky record: have you noticed that everything that was considered “far-right conspiracy” is proving to be at least partially true? From the laboratory origin of the virus to the questions about the effectiveness of the vaccine, one by one little sand cathedrals that the priests of siença built are falling. I just hope that some lessons can be learned from this rubble.
The WHO still hasn’t stamped the three copies of the official communiqué, but what the hell! I say to anyone who will listen: the Covid pandemic 19 is over. Life returned to normal. You can go around licking the banisters now. Sprinklers are free again to soar through the skies in lively tavern conversation. Even Coxa fans can hug each other in alviverde’s rare goals. Once again we are free to plan and imagine the future – at least until another panic sends us all aboard a new ship of fools.
